62 Quotes About Detachment

detachment is the ability to be free of attachments. It is an essential quality in any relationship, including the one between yourself and another person. Detachment is the key to happiness, because it allows us to love others without being affected by their actions or words. We all have good days and bad days, but when we develop the capacity to be detached, we can accept our circumstances with equanimity.

If you truly want to be respected by people you...
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If you truly want to be respected by people you love, you must prove to them that you can survive without them. Michael Bassey Johnson
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You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. Charlotte Eriksson
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Take any emotion–love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions–if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them–you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’. Mitch Albom
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Subhuti, someone might fill innumerable worlds with the seven treasures and give all away in gifts of alms, but if any good man or any good woman awakens the thought of Enlightenment and takes even only four lines from this Discourse, reciting, using, receiving, retaining and spreading them abroad and explaining them for the benefit of others, it will be far more meritorious. Now in what manner may he explain them to others? By detachment from appearances-abiding in Real Truth. -So I tell you- Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightening in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. When Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart they went their ways. . Gautama Buddha
People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after...
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People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realized that simplicity is the key to everything. Unknown
Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd...
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Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone. Michael Bassey Johnson
Like everything else, we know the futility of money only...
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Like everything else, we know the futility of money only when we have more than enough of it. R. N. Prasher
Things can be added, but that doesn't mean that anything...
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Things can be added, but that doesn't mean that anything is missing. Chris Matakas
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All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing. David Baldacci
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I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me. They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction. With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country. Jake Wood
When there is nothing to catch And nothing is catching...
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When there is nothing to catch And nothing is catching you, You are free; From all your separations! Sayantan Sen
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I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment. Charlotte Eriksson
It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is...
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It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something abou Tony Hendra
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You can continue to cry over the same pain & complain about the same situations or you can expand your mind and you can grow. Maybe im not alone when I say, sometimes we all get a little confused and feel like we owe it to the people and places to try harder when in reality, most of the time lessons become lifelong if we don't learn the art of peaceful detachment early in the game. Nikki Rowe
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The path towards living in a spiritual manner begins by eliminating inculcated cultural biases, destroying personal illusions, and gratefully accepting the world without sentimental artifice. Emotional detachment provides for clarity of vision. Kilroy J. Oldster
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Detachment is being apathetic or aloof to other people, while un-attachment is acknowledging and honoring other people, while choosing not to let them influence your emotional well being. Detached would mean I do not care, while un-attached means I care, although I am not going to alter my emotional state due to your emotions, words, or actions. Alaric Hutchinson
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Un-attachment (as opposed to detachment) is the acceptance that each and every person is responsible for his or her own reality, and that our joy, peace, security, and sense of love is not dependent on any other person or situation. We are each responsible for our own emotional well being. Alaric Hutchinson
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Attachment is the source of pain, but detachment is the source of joy. Debasish Mridha
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They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel. Gabrielle Zevin
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Scientific advancement carries risk, ” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine–they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.” Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility?. Dan Brown
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Mind can be your best friend or worst enemy. Kabira
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The sensation that allows you to experience the physical reality, when detached from the physical body allows you to realize life beyond the physical reality. Roshan Sharma
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I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/ D N A consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster–spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives. Ashim Shanker
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Never invest so much in anyone romantically that you lose your head. The Buddha of casual sex, I remain detached at all costs. Edward Vilga
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Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of oneself with no guarantee of reemergence. Ashim Shanker
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Recollection of death also serves as a useful preparation for the time when one actually has to face death. As the concluding exercise among the body contemplations, a regular recollection of death can lead to the realization that death is fearful only to the extent to which one identifies with the body. With the aid of the body contemplations one can come to realize the true [impermanent] nature of the body and thereby overcome one's attachment to it. Being free from attachment to the body, one will be freed from any fear of physical death. . Unknown
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Tell a child, that he will soon be homeless; he will slowly detach from the world. Tell that same child that he is now homeless, he will abandon all foundations. Tell the child he has a home again, he may return to Earth from his travels, but he will never want to see this world again. Unknown
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If I don't see the reason of someone being my friend, chances are, we are just floating and I need a ship to set sail. Michael Bassey Johnson
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I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude – a feeling which increases with the years. Albert Einstein
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The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one. Bill Bryson
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–Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.– I will take the risk, said Stephen.–And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. James Joyce
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Your personality of the mind is like a castle of sand around the sea. The time you begin to disassociate yourself with different experiences and impressions of both the external and internal world, you won’t find anything inside. Roshan Sharma
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All continuous suffering, is self inflicted. Unknown
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Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew. Bruce Crown
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We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing. Jen Pollock Michel
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It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly. Unknown
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Crossing the Atlantic on that new day was supposed to be a sharp delineation, a from-now-on demarcation in my life story. What I took off from was not supposed to arrive with me upon landing or ever pulse in me again. From the ocean and sky and the hours in flight, I intended to extract a selective, permanent amnesia. Laurie Perez
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I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“ Yes, ” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“ I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings. . Dorothy L. Sayers
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Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and to attach yourself to God. Remember, we all hunger for God, more than we hunger for a big bowl of ice cream or a perfect physique. . Kate Wicker
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Unrealistic expectations often lead to disappointment, while simple unbiased attention and detachment to outcome often lead to pleasant surprises. Unknown
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And do you see how beautiful and graceful the birds are when they are flying and soaring? The ground has many comforts for them to enjoy... But in the sky they are truly what a bird is meant to be. So it is with the human heart. Aleksandra Layland
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If you simply get detach from yourself, it gets easier for you to see, how you perceive life. Roshan Sharma
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All too often, the rabbit hole is as deep as you have dug it. Unknown
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It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual ‘magic’ causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents the development of emotional resilience. Christopher Dines
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[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95) Stephen Levine
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While understanding that we need this matrix to experience life on earth, we should also be able to enjoy a certain sense of detachment from it, and thus feel more empowered to make our own choices. We should thus come out feeling much more in control of our own personal journeys. Julia Woodman
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However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise. Michael Foley
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It was my letting go that gave me a better hold. Chris Matakas
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The possessions themselves were not the problem, it was my relationship with possessing. Chris Matakas
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As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.' Unknown
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Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate. . Unknown
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I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain. Joseph Roth
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I used to think I was in love with Mia because she was in love with me. Now when I watch her strutting down the runway, twisting and flouncing the way her mother trained her, I know she's just a human coat hanger. A wired body I hold late at night and try to fit into. Laurie Perez
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There is a world of difference between the experienceof 'care' — the wiping of a bottom, the bathing of a body: basicbiological obligations — and the intimacy that makes us wantto live. Antonella GambottoBurke
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There are, of course, the people who revolve around themselves--but I agree with you, she's not one of that kind. She's totally uninterested in herself. And yet she's got a strong character--there must be something. I thought at first it was her art--but it isn't. I've never met anyone so detached from life. That's dangerous.'' Dangerous? What do you mean?'' Well, you see--it must mean an obsession of some kind, and obsessions are always dangerous. Agatha Christie
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Life is a combo of attachment and detachment. Love is the most natural thing and you are bound to get attached to persons, places and things. However, while getting attached so, you should know that all these attachments too have an expiry date. It's exactly at that point that the art of detachment helps. Persons, places and things are meant for specific periods in life after which you should know how to let go and embrace newer things. The world is beautiful and you should have belief in Him. Neelam Saxena Chandra
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What did I get in return? Coldness and emotional detachment. You are selfish and bitter and you wouldn’t know a good thing if it fell out of the sky at your feet. Tarryn Fisher
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It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't. Unknown
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It's life that matters, nothing but life–the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detach Raymond Chandler
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Denial protected us, screening out certain experiences & feelings until we grew strong enough to relate to them... Yet it also dropped a curtain over our experience, obscuring it, leaving us with a sense of missing pieces. For instance, when we achieved something, we felt like an imposter. Or, though we had a relationship with a significant other, we often felt alone and unrelated to anyone. Maureen Brady